This Player’s Guide was released by Nintendo in October 1995, a few months after the game’s North American debut. Billed on the cover as “the complete guide to the past, present and future—straight from the pros at Nintendo,” the large-format guide in fact leaves much unsaid. Unlike the colorful early strategy guides from Japan, Chrono Trigger Player’s Guide is a mostly no-nonsense document. There are no illustrated bestiaries, no bonus comics, no interviews, and no mail-in prize giveaways. And a later unofficial guide from BradyGames published to coincide with the PlayStation port feels more like a technical report than a companion for playtime.

One of my high school friends had a brother playing through Final Fantasy 3 with those HUGE BradyGames guides – I think it had a table of EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF ARMOR AND WEAPONS in the game – it took about something like 100 pages.

This looked like nothing so much as what it was, old farts using their connections to shove material down the throats of those who don’t want it. It’s what we hate so much about today’s environment, rich people who think they know better and our entitled to their behavior.

For a moment I thought I’d have to explain to my mom and dad why there’s a U2 album that came out of nowhere on their iDevices – then I remembered that they don’t even touch the Music app.

What Cook and U2 probably wanted to duplicate yesterday was the organic delight when Beyoncé released an entire album out of the blue last December on iTunes. Instead, U2 stuffed a locksmith card in your doorframe, which you’ve probably already tossed.

…imagine what it would have been like if, instead of a free U2 album, Apple gave away a brand new Dr. Dre album.

In this episode of Song Exploder, Anamanaguchi talks about how words don’t mean anything in pop music – they may as well not even be in English. Then it hit me, I didn’t even know the words “prom” and “night” were even in this track.

I heard something on the radio this morning that got me fired up. It was a segment about tips on how to save more money. What came was a predictable list of “brew your own coffee,” “buy generic products,” and “bring your lunch to work!”

I can’t stand these lists. I think they’re dangerous, because the average American’s dismal financial state has little to do with coffee, name brands, or lunch. The people writing these articles mean well. But they’re the equivalent of telling a drowning man how to dry his clothes — advice that seems helpful but misses the bigger problem.

I tried to keep a datebook one summer, but it didn’t work out. I’d get confused and write down things just to write them down and I came to this realization that I didn’t do enough things to keep a datebook.

Getting an email address was once a nerdy right of passage for Gen-Xers arriving on college campuses. Now, the kids are waging a war of indifference on poor old email, culling the weak and infirm old-people technology. One American professor maintained that, to his students, “e-mail was as antiquated as the spellings ‘chuse’ and ‘musick’ in the works by Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards.” The vice-chancellor of Exeter University claimed, “There is no point in emailing students any more.” The youth appear to think there are better, faster, more exciting ways to communicate than stupid email.

Yet, despite all the prognosticators predicting it will—choose the violence level of your metaphor—go out of style, be put out to pasture, or taken out back and shot, email grinds on.